Bump… Set…

The National Championship game was a bitter-sweet affair, but there was one part of the game that was sweetamazing un-flipping-believable: Spike Motherf***ing Albrecht. the guy came in averaging 2.2 points per game, and he scored 17 points in an 11-minute stretch in the title game. I mean…

Spike Albrecht was on the front page of CNN. Spike Albrecht was trending on Twitter. Spike Albrecht made thousands of curly fries, and those curly fries each went on to shoot lights-out from the outside.

Now, imagine for a second that you are this guy. The world has been awed by your meteoric rise. Today you are a god, but you know that, like Gangnam Style and the Harlem Shake, your run can end at any moment. What do you do? Yeah, you’d probably do this:

This, as Adam Jacobi pointed out, has all the hallmarks of a “heat check.” And while some of you probably think Kate might be out of his range, he’s shown this week that his range is a lot broader than you might have expected.

Moral High Ground: Crumbly, But Extant

As we discussed on an earlier installment, a Michigan Man is gracious in victory and stoic in defeat. Unlike our younger brethren in East Lansing, we can deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with an unflinching gaze. So despite the glorious nature of the win on Saturday and the heartbreaking nature of loss on Monday, we know that these fine Michigan Men would not resort to the kind of childish tomfoolery as those Neanderthals in green and white.

Well, balls. Reports differ, but what is known that several fires were spotted on Michigan’s campus after both the Syracuse game and the Louisville game. Most of these fires involved couches. This induced groans from Michigan fans and glee from Michigan State fans. As a result of this dumb-ass display, I received two types of comments from the many Sparty fans I interact with on a regular basis.*

1) “LOL, looks like scUM isn’t as morally superior as they think. Get off your high horse, scUM”

I hate to say it, but I think they’re right. For as much crap as we talk every time Michigan State burns a couch, we torched them sons-o'-b*tches at the first chance we got… and then after the VERY NEXT chance we got two days later. It’ll take some serious myopia to be all “hurr, go burn some more couches, couch-burners” after this. This was an immature, brah-tastic display by Michigan students. Anyone who thinks this is a Sparty-specific thing is wrong, and anyone who supports this kind of thing makes us all look bad. And is someone who sucks. If we're gonna claim to be above this sort of thing, we have to either be above this sort of thing or we should STFU.

2) “LOL, looks like that ‘Michigan State riots and burns couches’ meme is gonna have to die now!”

Whoooooa there, fella. Not so fast.

First, sure, Michigan burned a few couches, but if we’re gonna call this a riot, then Michigan sucks so very much at rioting. Let’s compare the videos:

One of these is a riot. One of these is a s'more roast gone bad. I'll let you decide which is which.

Second, it isn’t like this is some little thing that Michigan fans conjured up out of nothing. The good people at The Google will back us up on this:

(h/t @cgaerig)

(h/t @Bry_Mac) (Hey… dat’s a me!)

(h/t @AceAnbender)

When the Internet thinks of riots and burning couches, it thinks East Lansing. When it thinks East Lansing, it thinks of riots. QED. Besides, since when do rivalry memes live and die with “facts”? A couple of years ago polling data came out that completely destroyed the entire factual basis for the “Walmart Wolverine” meme. Have you noticed a decline in “Walvie” references? No? Okay, then go back you your couch-burning, you couch-burners.

[*Full Disclosure: I am the son of two Spartans. I married a Spartan. My sister was a double-Spartan. I’ve lived in the Lansing area for almost six years of my life. I speak fluent Brah. I am not one of them, but I am of them.]

Mark May is Terrible at Everything

What if your entire life was about the dumbest things you ever bothered to write down? Well… you’d be Mark May.

May is not good at not being wrong. He also has a running battle with Ohio State dating back to the Tatgate thing. It is not unlike the Michigan/Mike Rosenberg relationship. They hate this dude, and he seems to dislike them just about as much.

Fortunately, Ramzy (@ramzy) at Eleven Warriors has a handy database of other wise calls May has made over the years:

The terrible thing about the Internet is that nothing is ever forgotten. The fabulous thing about the Internet is that nothing stupid ever said by annoying professional trolls is ever forgotten. I suggest keeping an eye on Ramzy’s feed for future troll trolling.

(Also, I’m not sure if your aware, but May also dislikes spelling and grammar. But that is neither hear nor their.

)

[UPDATE: Oh, Internet. You never let me down. Looks like overnight @mgoblog, @AceAnbender, @BrianMFloyd, @edsbs, and others jumped on the "look at the amazing things Mark May has said" bandwagon. And it is glorious. I recommend taking 10 minutes of your day to soak in the wisdom.]

[DEFINITIVE UPDATE: Jason Kirk summarizes the Tao of Mark May. All the points]

What Have You Done For Me Lately? Yeah? DON’T CARE YOU STILL SUCK

Losses bring out the trolls in the best of us. In defeat, people freak out and blame the blameless things. They say heat-of-the-moment crap that they know at the time to be stupid, but they can’t help themselves. “Trey Burke is terrible.” “Denard doesn’t seem to care.” “Navarre AAAAAAAHHH NAVARRE.” That is why I largely discount the stupid stuff that happens after losses. The 504 errors on the MGoBoard after a particularly bad loss are usually a blessing in disguise.

But after Saturday’s win (again, I emphasize after Michigan’s FINAL FOUR VICTORY), Ace engaged in this conversation, and it made my jaw drop, melt, and re-form as a giant cartoon mallet that bashed me into the ground like a tent peg:

Substantively, he is almost certainly wrong. The problem down the stretch against Syracuse was free throw shooting, and while Beilein is admittedly a poor free throw shooter, I don’t know if we can blame him for those misses. And as Ace pointed out, the epic return of Jordan Morgan was 100% JB. He used his subs. It was crazy.

Beyond that, the object lesson here is that some people will never, ever be happy. Your team just won a gigantic game. They’re going to the freeking National Championship. Your impulse should be “OMG THIS COUCH MUST DIE,” [Note: resist the impulse. Save the couches] not “I HAZ CONCERNS”. It saddens me that there are Michigan fans who couldn’t enjoy the run Michigan just made, because dollars to donuts you will never have a run that is more fun than this one. And at the highest point of that run, there were people honestly and legitimately complaining about various stuff. And it wasn’t just this guy; after I read this, I poked around to see if other people were seriously upset after the game. And there were. But I stopped reading them because I had some g*ddamn celebrating to do.

this didnt highlight Jose Canseco and his sudden Twitter entrance into a parallel universe where Michigan and Syracuse were tied at 14 sec, and Syracuse won on a buzzer beater with .3 left. Seriously. That happened. Check the feed.

Also, spot on about the Michigan fans complaining during the throes of victory. The dude who was calling for Shaka Smart as the next Michigan head coach and oh-by-the-way John Beilein's squad just destroyed VCU, but apparently JB still sucks...yeah, that type of thing happens. Give it a rest, please. You're ruining my buzz from an incredible hoops tourney run.

i understand the vitriol directed at mark may. i mean, i get it, i guess - espn talking head and all - but this seems more like "enemy of my enemy is my friend." anyone who uses a loud pulpit to bash ohio is OK in my book.

But Mark May is like a machine gun in the hands of Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies: it lacks any real direction in its spray, and at any point can turn on you or someone you love. Also, he's a horrible front-runner and shit-stirrer in the mold of guys like Cowherd and whoever they stick on First Take.

would be brilliant, witty, and highly knowledgable - not just about your program, its history, the current players, and the strategy and Deep Theory of the sport itself, but also on the best places to eat in town, the more challenging aspects of string theory, and the best up and coming bands no one else has heard of yet.

In short, just like you... only slightly less good looking.

That would also make trashing rival teams and fanbases so much more enjoyable. But in the real world, there are good fans and bad fans, and some of the mouth breathers do root for your teams, complain senselessly about your teams, or at least drink way too much and burn couches in honor (?) of your teams. Some of them are probably a lot better looking than you in spite of the wood alcohol they obviously drank in those critical developmental years. Thanks for the reality check, fellas!

From about 2001-2004 I was living in a small house on John Street between S. Division and Fingerle Lumber. Every few weeks I would walk out the front door in the morning and see the charred remains of some old couch sitting next to the curb.

I distinctly recall one particular stretch in which there were couch-burnings on nine consecutive evenings. I didn't know who was doing it, because almost every other house on the block was occupied by large groups of hard-drinking undergraduates. At fist, my thought was, "okay, at some point they have to run out of couches to burn, right?" But after five or six straight nights of couch burnings, I decided to do a little poking around.

I forget what steps led me to it, but I shortly came upon a suspcious house at the corner of John & South Division. There, from the street I spotted a couple pieces of upholstered furniture in the back yard. I snuck around the house for a better look, and whoah: when I reached a vantage point where I could see the entire back yard, it looked like a full-blown couch graveyard. There must have been at least 20 couches there, all grubby and various states of decay. I felt kind of like being Indiana Jones looking out over the Nazi excavation of Tanis.

I thought briefly about confronting the occupants to say, "hey, I know it's you -- stop burning couches or I'll call the cops." But I knew I would never have actually called the police on them, so I decided to just let it go.

I will say that I know of people in college who, in lieu of trying to get rid of a couch, decided to burn them up. I dare say that that sort of pragmatic "I want this couch to vanish" couch-burning, while still a pretty bad idea, is more defensible than the celebratory type of couch-burning.